Code breakers
Rose-Ayling Ellis takes her first leading role in Code of Silence, an ITV drama about a deaf woman who is thrown into a world of crime. She joins creator Catherine Moulton to detail their mission to blend an authentic representation of the deaf experience with a high-stakes thriller.
From roles in Stephen Poliakoff’s Summer of Rockets to more than 100 appearances in BBC soap EastEnders, and a winning run in Strictly Come Dancing, Rose Ayling-Ellis’s star is continuing to rise. This year, she has already appeared in BBC drama Reunion and Doctor Who episode The Well.
Her next project now marks the actor’s biggest part to date, as the lead in ITV drama Code of Silence, created by Catherine Boulton.
She plays Alison Brooks, a smart and determined deaf woman who, having spent years working in a police canteen and secretly observing conversations, finds her exceptional lip-reading skills catch the attention of DS Ashleigh Francis (Charlotte Ritchie) and DI James Marsh (Andrew Buchan).
Alison is then recruited to support a covert operation tracking a gang that is plotting their next heist – but she soon finds herself drawn to one of the suspects, Liam Barlow (Kieron Moore), putting her life in danger.
“Originally I was thinking, ‘Oh no, it’s another lip-reading one’ where they have a myth of lip-reading from a distance and understanding everything,” Ayling-Ellis tells DQ. “But what really drew me out is how they’re going to make it that lip-reading is a puzzle, and how hard it is. That’s what really drew me to it. Then meeting Cat [Boulton] and realising she’s losing her hearing, I’m like, ‘Oh, you get it.’ Cat is also a lip-reader and she knows how hard it is, so I was like, ‘Yes, let’s do it.’”
Boulton first developed the series based on her own experiences of lip-reading and hearing loss, having been partially deaf since she was quite young. As her hearing worsened, she started to have lip-reading lessons and gained a greater understanding of the theory behind what had previously been quite an instinctive skill.
“I was looking for things to write and it felt like, because lip-reading is a puzzle and lip-readers are putting different bits of information together, they are like detectives,” she says. “It just felt perfect really to have a lip-reader as a detective in a crime show.”
She wrote an outline for the series, which secured Ayling-Ellis, who is deaf and uses British Sign Language, and then wrote a script with producer Mammoth Screen. With Ayling-Ellis already attached, ITV quickly commissioned a six-part series, which debuts in the UK this Sunday. It is directed by Diarmuid Goggins (Kin) and Chanya Button (Doctor Who).
From the outset, it’s clear Alison is a character looking for more from life. So when the opportunity arises to join a police operation, she jumps at the chance to pour over CCTV footage of a gang in the hope that she can lip-read what they’re saying and help the team of detectives foil their next raid. Yet by the end of episode one, it’s already clear Alison has become enamoured with her new job, so much so that she pushes the boundaries of her role and comes into contact with the gang – and Liam in particular.
“She makes [the series] relevant to a lot of deaf people’s experiences and frustration because Alison is frustrated. Other people around her decided what her destination is and what she is able to do,” Ayling-Ellis says. “She knows she can do so much more but nobody is giving her the opportunity to do so. They just think, ‘You’ve got a job’ and think she should be very grateful for it. That is why she goes too far sometimes, and she is overstepping the boundaries, because she is determined to prove everyone wrong.”
Working with the police presents Alison with a chance to make more for herself. “But there are times when they say, ‘Stop, Alison,’ and she’s like, ‘I’m not going to stop.’ It’s kind of like she played along with society thinking, ‘Oh, she’s just some deaf girl that works in the pub.’ But she uses that to her advantage to get what she wants.”
The authenticity of the deaf experience in the series was key to both Ayling-Ellis and Moulton at all times, and viewers are thrown into this world through a number of different methods. On several occasions, the sound becomes muffled, as if it’s being heard underwater, to reflect Alison’s own hearing.
“Being in crowded places, you can’t really understand what’s going on,” the actor says. “But there was a balance we had to work on because, at the same time, it’s drama – and drama isn’t always the most realistic thing. We don’t want to be documentary, we want to be entertaining. So there are some times when you lip-read one particular word and actually that would be really hard, but we need that word for the story and drama, so we’re having a balance between the two. I would say don’t take everything like, ‘Oh my God, this is what all deaf people experience.’ It’s an element of it.”
“It’s very much a first-person perspective show,” adds Moulton, “and I really wanted to put Alison at the centre of the show and make it her story. She’s an active protagonist. I didn’t want her on the sidelines with all the exciting action going on elsewhere, so it is really important that you’re with her. We wanted to portray her experience like that and give you those moments where you’re experiencing what she’s experiencing.”
In fact, the use of sound effects in the series to replicate Alison’s experience came from times on set when people asked Ayling-Ellis what she could hear. “And I can’t explain because I don’t know what you can hear, so I don’t know what you’re comparing it with,” she says. She then used a piece of equipment that allows others to hear what she can hear through her hearing aid, and even recorded some of the sound and sent it to the production’s sound department for them to play with.
“There’ll be times when you hear the sound through her hearing aid, but then this whole water effect thing is more in her head,” the actor adds. “So it was really fun to work with the sound department on how to make that work.”
The challenge of writing the series for Moulton – who worked with Will Truefitt (ep 3) and Benji Waltersc (ep 4) – centred on how lip-reading would be depicted. The result sees words appear on the screen as Alison attempts to decipher what the gang are saying.
“It’s often quite difficult and you don’t get full sentences,” the writer says of lip-reading. “It’s not like reading a book. You do get fragments here and there, and giving the audience that experience but also telling an intriguing crime story that makes you want to lean in and know more was the trickiest bit really, making that work.”
Prior to filming, all cast and crew completed a deaf awareness course so that once they were on set, everyone knew how to interact with the various interpreters working with Ayling-Ellis and other deaf people on the team. The actor also helped the cast and crew learn British Sign Language with a Sign of the Day.
All the various trailers at the unit base were also colour-coded to help team members with visual impairments, and every location and utility was designed to be completely accessible for wheelchair users such as executive producer Briony Arnold.
“There were just little things like that,” says Ayling-Ellis, who is also an exec producer on the series. “We never really noticed it because we didn’t make such a big deal about it. It’s only noticeable when we go on a set and it’s not accessible. But when you provide it all, it’s not noticeable.
RELATED CONTENT
Arranging Reunion
BBC thriller Reunion is a story of revenge and redemption – and a bilingual series featuring spoken English and British Sign Language. Creator William Mager and star Matthew Gurney tell DQ how they made the show and how they sought to represent deaf people authentically.
Second act
From learning lines to writing them, actors Andrei Alén, Genevieve Barr, Ólafur Darri Ólafsson and Leah Purcell discuss their individual journeys behind the camera to become screenwriters, and how they have used their unique experiences and perspectives to shape the stories they want to tell.
Turning up the volume on hidden disability
As long-running British medical drama Casualty dedicates an episode to its first regular deaf character, DQ speaks to actor Gabriella Leon and writers Charlie Swinbourne and Sophie Woolley about shining a light on this hidden disability.
“Because you provide access, it saves more time and it saves more money because then everyone can actually get on with their work rather than all this chaos.”
“I worked in development for years before I was a writer so I’ve been on a lot of sets and it did feel to me like a very different set,” says Moulton. “There were deaf, disabled and neurodiverse people there and interpreters on the set, so it felt very different but, at the same time, it was really smooth. Everyone worked together really well, so it felt really exciting to see that.”
Aspects of the way Code of Silence was filmed also had to change to accommodate the use of sign language. Close-ups of Alison had to be carefully chosen to avoid chopping off the actor’s signing, while scenes where the character was lip-reading couldn’t be too dark.
“Quite often, especially with lip-reading scenes, I’d go behind the scenes and watch on the monitor,” Ayling-Ellis says, “and sometimes I’m like, ‘Oh, the room is too dark.’ The lighting team are like, ‘But it’s beautiful lighting.’ I’m, like, ‘No, we’re not going to be able to lip-read.’ Or some of the actors decided to eat food while they’re speaking and I’m like, ‘Can you stop eating? You can’t lip-read if food’s in your mouth.’
“It was such a happy crew. Everyone really wanted to do right, everyone felt like they’d got a purpose, and it motivates everyone. It drives them.”
As for leading a show on screen for the first time, Ayling-Ellis says making Code of Silence was fun but tiring, as she was on set every day and in almost every scene during production, which ran from last September to the end of the year.
“Being the lead role, I didn’t realise how much you can really affect the mood of the whole crew,” she says. “If I’m miserable, I make the director miserable, and then the director makes the first AD miserable, and then it pushes on. So if I’m happy and positive, and really motivate everyone, then everyone’s like, ‘Yeah, let’s do it,’ and everyone wants to do their best work.
“There was one time when it got a bit too much. Naturally that happens to anyone when there are people around you all the time, and I said, ‘Is it possible to have a chair outside just for me to sit and have some air for two minutes?’ The team was so lovely that they went a step further and built a tent with heating and they put a plant in there and the chair. It was really sweet because everyone really looked after each other. I’m sure if I was a knobhead, they wouldn’t even give me a chair,” she jokes.
After BBC drama Reunion debuted last month, Code of Silence marks the second major British drama with deaf protagonists to air this year, and Ayling-Ellis says there are so many more stories to tell.
“With TV, they constantly want to find what hasn’t been done before. I’m like, ‘Hello! There’s so many there!’ It’s not just, ‘One deaf story, done.’ No, there are so many different angles. With a deaf person in it, it makes the story richer because it’s a new experience.”
The actor and Moulton also both believe there is more of Alison’s story to tell, should ITV decide to order a second season. Distributed by ITV Studios, the series will also air on BritBox in the US and Canada later this year.
“It’s definitely designed to come back,” Moulton says. “We’ve got to wait and see how it does, but we’d love to do more.”
“I hope so. I want another series, then I can get a new kitchen,” Ayling-Ellis quips. “I want people to watch this and not think, ‘Oh, it’s just another one of those programmes that is an educational, preachy show.’ It’s not. It’s just an entertainment show that happens to be a drama and it’s showing you a different world.”
Like that? Watch this! Suggested by AI, selected by DQ
The Bay: ITV’s long-running series about a police family liaison officer drawn into a number of complex cases in the northern English town of Morecambe.
Protection: An ITV and BritBox crime thriller about a witness protection officer who, professionally compromised by a secret affair with a colleague, seeks to uncover the true source of corruption within her unit.
Unforgotten: The acclaimed ITV series follows a pair of detectives solving cold cases, with a cast of guest stars in each season playing a seemingly disparate group of characters – until the growing evidence starts to link them to each other and the crime.
tagged in: Britbox, Catherine Moulton, Code of Silence, ITV, ITV Studios, Mammoth Screen, Rose Ayling-Ellis